


Courtesy Visit

by Kathar



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Hospitals, M/M, Memorials, Season/Series 01-02 Hiatus, Vignette, hurt/comfort... ish, where's Felix 2k14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 08:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2725112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kathar/pseuds/Kathar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>All things considered, Phil would not have traded his pre-death life for Blake's. He was even less inclined to trade his post-death life, both because he was enjoying the newfound looseness with which his metaphorical Agent's suit fit, and because he was selfish with his joys-- and wouldn't wish his sorrows on even his worst enemies.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In which Director Coulson makes an overdue trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Courtesy Visit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [faeleverte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/gifts).



> Thanks and more thanks to the glorious [faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte), beta extraordinaire, braintwin, and coauthor. This story was initially written just after the Agents of SHIELD Season One finale, but its tone it owes something to the early episodes of Season 2.
> 
> Set in the [Two-Man Rule universe](http://archiveofourown.org/series/61710), post-Recovery. You don’t have to have read that to read this.

"So this isn't going to make you any less convinced that I'm the Clairvoyant, but Victoria Hand is dead," Phil said, and sat down next to the hospital bed.

Its occupant turned and glared at him, eyes and brows more marked than usual against his pallor.

Phil fell silent under that glare, his hands clasped between his knees, and waited for a further reaction.

After a while, the occupant rolled his eyes, and spiralled his hand in a "do go on" gesture. Since his other hand was still strapped to an IV and he had a breathing mask covering his face, Phil was inclined to forgive him the rudeness. This once. Given everything.

"Ward shot her. He was... as it turns out..." Phil stopped, shook his head, swallowed heavily, and looked down. He didn't want to know what face his bedridden host was making; he didn't want to know what face _he_ was making, either, frankly. 

"As it turns out," he continued when his voice was back under his control, "He was a HYDRA agent from day one."

 _Under my own nose. And I didn't see it. Didn't look closely enough._ Phil'd had entirely too much time, since, to take a second look. His own private torture, maybe, since it didn't seem to be producing much _else._

His failure to see. Not that he was the only one Grant Ward had fooled; he'd snowed, at one point or another, every SHIELD agent he'd ever met.

Every loyal SHIELD agent.

Melinda and Skye, Phil knew, were living with the same sour taste on their tongues whenever they thought of Ward. But Phil had been their leader. However preoccupied he might have been with those damned mirages in his own memory, and however much Melinda might claim she'd chosen his team for him, it had been Phil's ultimate responsibility. 

If he'd only looked _harder_ , under more stones, if he hadn't lost the edge he'd had before his death, maybe Victoria Hand would still be alive.

The snort from the bed made him look up. Underneath the distorting plastic of the mask, Phil was being given dirty look of a completely uncalled-for intensity.

Phil glared back, because he was damn good at dirty-look interpretation, and that one was saying "melodramatic, much?"

And no, he didn't think he was.

All things considered.

His conversational partner rolled his eyes, held up a finger to fend him off, then grasped the mask and pulled it upwards.

"Garrett was the Clairvoyant?" Agent Blake rasped, in the same disgusted tone of voice Phil had heard him use about that one safehouse with the toilet in the kitchen. Where had it been? Riga? An op that had, ironically, also included Garrett. Whichever it was, Blake was more than owed the disgust, seeing as how he'd ended up riddled with bullets in the doomed attempt to capture the Clairvoyant that just preceded the fall of SHIELD. 

"Yeah. HYDRA since just after Serbia, apparently."

"Well, I always knew he was an amoral narcissistic idiot who thinks a turtleneck is a subversive way to hide a double-chin and that Paco Rabane is something you bathe in, but I didn't think he was that off his rocker."

"He went a hell of a lot more off his rocker before the end," Phil said, and shuddered. He and Garrett shared blood now, in a weird way-- only half symbolic. Blood and possibly the madness inherent in it, that led to writing on the wall and who knew what else. What would creep from Phil's skull given the opportunity.

"Got him good?" Blake asked, and Phil shrugged.

"Good enough." 

"Hope it hurt."

"Bits and pieces." Phil remembered Dethlo-- Mike Peterson, the wounded, terrified, enraged father-- making sure the man responsible for kidnapping his son was down and out of commission. "Nothing would have made up for the pain he caused."

"Yeah, well, welcome to life. Just as long as he's not getting up again."

And now, Phil remembered Garrett disintegrating in a flash of blue.

"Not unless someone's got a really large pot of glue."

Blake grinned, something with no humor behind it, and put the mask back on.

Abrasive as Felix Blake could be, Phil had always appreciated that about him; he knew what lay under the smooth exterior an agent presented to the world. Phil's own shield of deflective nonchalance was nothing to his.

For a lot of years, he'd thought Blake actually bought into the Man in Black persona they all used from time to time. Blake had always played the Agent's Agent far more smoothly that Phil had; Phil knew his inner enthusiast broke out at the seams a little bit. 

He'd wave it off with fond humor when Clint would grumble about Blake "stealing Phil's spy face," but privately, it drove him slightly crazy that Blake was so good at _Phil's_ game. Their shared game.

Then again, Phil had a _hell_ of a lot of game beyond the mild-mannered Man-in-Black, as Clint could well attest. There were compensations. 

All things considered, Phil would not have traded his pre-death life for Blake's. He was even less inclined to trade his post-death life, both because he was enjoying the newfound looseness with which his metaphorical Agent's suit fit, and because he was selfish with his joys-- and wouldn't wish his sorrows on even his worst enemies.

He'd seen how that ended for Garrett.

It wasn’t a conclusion Phil had come to lightly, either.

He’d frankly resented Blake, after he’d died and come back to life only to be hidden away by Director Fury. Blake had taken over missions with Clint, with Natasha, had seemed to step ever more firmly into the holes Phil had left behind him when he’d died, the people who had once been his. It hadn’t helped that Blake had seemed determined to lord it over him, the once that Phil had seen him before their shared Clairvoyant-hunt, going so far as to _touch Lola,_ in a perfectly playground taunt.

_I have everything that was yours._

When had Phil stopped caring about that? Before he’d seen Blake again, before he’d found out Blake thought he was the Clairvoyant himself. Probably when Phil’d found out that he’d never been to Tahiti at all, except in memories written over his gray matter while he lay screaming. When Phil himself destroyed all remaining ties to his old life, in a fit of self-destructive rage. 

Looking at Blake now, shriveled into his hospital bed, still staring up at him with those dark doe eyes of his, Phil realized that smooth exterior really was just a shell. Phil’s suit might have sat as uneasily on Blake as Phil’s own new life had sat with him-- which only made Phil feel worse for the casual way he’d dismissed the man during his brief visits with Clint and Natasha in Clint’s little Bed-Stuy apartment. Ever since he’d come back to life, he’d been carelessly making life worse for Blake, it seemed.

Out of the fall of SHIELD, the desperate race to take down John Garrett and the days that had followed, Phil had somehow regained everything he’d lost: his confidence in himself and his team; his conviction that he was doing work that _mattered_ , that no one else could do-- and his Clint. Hell, there he’d regained the love he hadn’t even known he’d thrown away.

Blake, meanwhile, had nearly died, been tied to a hospital bed and weak when SHIELD fell, and had only barely survived the emergency evacuation that had taken him-- taken his entire hospital bed and team-- into hiding once General Talbot started hunting down SHIELD members. Survived the infection that had set in. In its own way, it was an impressive feat of endurance-- but it had taken its toll. 

After all that hell, Blake's Agent face was fragile, and the news of Victoria's death had hit it like a minor earthquake. There were fissures at all the edges.

Phil didn’t think he had it in him, to try and address everything that lay between them in the recent past.

But perhaps he didn’t have to, just yet. 

"D'you remember," Phil said after a moment, when he was sure his voice wouldn't waver, "the safehouse in Albuquerque?"

Blake's eyebrows shot up, and he blinked. Phil'd always been the best at reading Blake's eyebrows-- it came from rooming with the guy during their time at Ops, he thought-- and now they were saying _whiplash much?_

"You know," Phil pressed onwards. "The one we found squatters in. And we couldn't kick them out without blowing our cover."

Blake pulled his mask up.

"The mariachi band," he said, and pulled it down again. The fissures were starting to heal a little; probably much to Blake's relief.

"The mariachi band. Whose hotel had fallen through. And who refused to stop practicing so we could sleep, since 'they were there first.'"

Blake had _hated_ them, had spent their entire residence pacing around the perimeter of the safehouse, glaring. Just like he was glaring at Phil, now.

"You remember how hot Sitwell got, bitching about how badly he needed his rest, muttering threats at the horn player? And how Victoria--" Phil broke for a moment, remembering her making this little complicated face in Sitwell's direction.He'd never been able to identify what lay behind it, but that was the mental image of her that came to him first, last, always now. 

"-- how _cool_ Victoria was," he continued. "I was shocked, since she always had a temper at work. Not a big one, just a cold, snappish one. She didn't like upsets."

Another eyeroll from Blake, but this one seemed almost... fond. Phil smiled a little, and examined his hands again.

"But she took one look at Sitwell, remember, and at you pacing, and at me trying to play it cool and failing miserably, and then she walked over to that horribly lumpy couch, folded herself down on it, and told us goodnight. And went straight to sleep."

Her suit all battered, bloody where her now-missing kevlar vest had not covered her, hair going every which way, Victoria Hand had nevertheless managed to look like a queen reposing on her sofa. Just waiting for a servant to come with a bowl of grapes-- and possibly an asp.

He heard Blake lift the mask again.

"I'd never seen someone sleep aggressively before. It was awe-inspiring. Sitwell nearly exploded."

"Yeah." Phil felt his eyebrows encroaching on his nose. 

"Pity about Jasper," Blake said, nearly a whisper, and Phil was ashamed of the relief that flooded him. _At least that's one bit of bad news I don't have to tell him_.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, sorting through old memories and lost companions. At least, that's what Phil was doing, and he assumed Blake was doing the same. 

Sharing his ghosts there in the quiet of the sterile room was unexpectedly restful. That for a little space, he wasn't expected to inspire anyone or put on a public face, but that an open display of feelings wouldn't be required-- or especially welcomed. He regulated his emotions around Melinda, still, although they were growing easier with each other again. Clint expected-- and deserved-- the hidden side of Phil, and Phil was trying his best to give it; was grateful Clint was there to receive it. All the same, it was exhausting work.

He'd needed this visit himself, more than he knew. Did that make him selfish? Well. If so, Blake was hardly going to call him on it.

The shadows grew low in the room, and Blake's breathing, even beneath the mask, grew a little harsh. Phil knew time was running short.

"Felix, I--" he began, but Blake shook his head, and cut him off. 

The mask popped back up.

"I had a visit from our old boss," he said, and Phil looked up. Blake's breathing mask might be off, but his Agent mask was back on.

"I'd hoped you might," Phil said. "What did he say?"

"He said there's a new boss in town, and he could tell me all about what he'd been up to, once he stopped by."

Phil snorted.

"That's just like him."

"It is. So. Where do you head from here? 'Cause I bet I'm not the only lonely agent on your list."

Phil shifted in his seat, realized his own agent mask had come down again.

"Got a line on Isabelle. Hartley. I... want to bring her in. And."

"And," Blake agreed, and heaved a sigh. "You figured you'd better practice breaking the news about Victoria on me, first."

"Yeah," Phil wasn't proud of it, but it was at least partially true. Well. That and... perhaps he'd needed the space for his own grief, without intruding it on her.

"Ah, well," Blake said after a long moment. "So. New boss: what else can I help you with?"

Surprise straightened Phil's spine like an electric shock.

"I thought... I'm sorry, I guess I didn't... I didn't want to assume. I figured, given the chance, you might want to hop to another agency. Or even Stark Industries. Maria's there now. She'd find you room."

It wasn't that he wasn't collecting agents, trying to piece back together a network of people and assets to walk in the dark places-- but Blake had been a courtesy visit, a _friendly_ visit, though both of them would reject the word if it were ever uttered aloud. He hadn't expected Blake to be one of his against-all-odds men.

Wanted, sure.

Just figured he'd get an "are you crazy" look for asking.

Which was, in fact, the look Blake was giving him now.

"Phil, I'm a SHIELD agent, as long as there's a SHIELD. I get told we've still got a Director, and he thinks there's still work for us to do? I would like to do it, and to stop having to lay around in this damned backwater burg in a highly uncomfortable hospital bed that is, I am sure, giving me bedsores as we speak. I can feel them rising now. So, Director Coulson, what are your orders, sir?"

Phil smiled weakly at him. _Yeah, maybe I'm still a little jealous of that Agent-face of yours, Felix._

"Agent Blake?"

"Yes."

"I'll need you as a regional lead, both with logistics and on threat analysis, and evaluation of our incoming recruits and returns. That is, when I have some. Meanwhile? Your orders are to stay in this backwater burg and recover."

"Oh fuck you, Phil."

Yes, this had been a visit worth making.

"Glad to have you on board, Felix."

Fin

**Author's Note:**

> This fic inspired in part by [ Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos](http://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/post/65688667533).
> 
> No, I’m serious.
> 
> A year ago today, Faeleverte and I gave up sanity and posted  Firewall, the first co-authored story in the eventual nine story arc of Two-Man Rule. At the time, we’d been under the impression it was a one-off.
> 
> We’ve always had a problem with moderation.
> 
> For more in the Two-Man Rule 'Verse, go read Fae's fabulous A Pirate and a Mercenary Walk Into A Bar: A Love Story featuring the ex-Director of SHIELD and his new favorite mercenary.


End file.
